Notification mails sent 2 days before leak of police antiterror files+

TOKYO, Jan. 1 Kyodo -
Notification emails indicating that Japanese police documents on international
terrorist activities will be posted on an Internet site were sent to a police
investigator and about a dozen other addressees two days before they were
leaked online in late October, investigative sources said Saturday.
The communication was sent on the morning of Oct. 26 to the investigator, who
is currently on loan from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department to the
National Police Agency, and others, including a Muslim group in Japan and the
U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, the sources said.
The email, sent from a free electronic mail address that includes the name of
NPA Commissioner General Takaharu Ando, contained a link to an online file
storage service where recipients of the email can access files posted on the
site, they said.
It was sent to multiple addressees as a blind copy, or bcc, in which recipients
cannot see who else the email was addressed to, but some of the addresses it
was transmitted to were no longer in use, according to the sources.
The investigator, who was one of the recipients, noticed the email on Oct. 28,
but did not access the link, suspecting that it may be a spam, they said.
In addition, an email that had the 114 leaked documents attached to it was sent
in the early hours of Oct. 28 in the name of Ichiro Yamada to a senior official
of the Saitama prefectural police, the sources said.
The Tokyo police have confiscated the communication records of the Internet
service providers to check who sent the emails, suspecting that police insiders
might have been involved in leaking the documents, they said.
According to the Tokyo police, five compressed folders containing the 114
documents were released on the Internet on the night of Oct. 28 via the
file-swapping software Winny and spread through a server located in Luxembourg.
==Kyodo